Primary Goals of Cognitive Rehabilitation

Cognition refers to thinking skills, they are different from intellectual skills. Examples of cognitive skills are attention, memory, problem solving, planning, organization, initiation, error recognition, awareness. Each lobe of our brain is responsible for different thinking skills. Depending on the location of the brain injury, some, or all of these thinking skills may be affected. The ability to complete tasks in the same way as you used to may be affected. The primary goal of cognitive rehabilitation is to improve injury related deficits in order to maximize independence and quality of life. Cognitive rehabilitation takes a stepwise approach:

Impairment identification, awareness and goal setting-assisting clients to recognize specific limitation(s) that require intervention in an emotionally supportive relationship and establishing short and long term goals. This involves establishing a list of strengths and weaknesses through an interview and an assessment process.

Compensation -refers to the reorganization of function, with, other areas of the brain taking over. For example, if one area of the brain is damaged, brain cells surrounding the damaged area may undergo changes in their function and shape that allows them to take on the functions of the damaged cells. This stage is based upon providing clients with the necessary strategies to address ongoing cognitive limitations when the usual way of doing things is currently not as effective as it used to be.

Internalization-the process of gradually increasing the automaticity of practiced strategies. We need to practice a new skill before it becomes automatic, clients need to practice the use of newly learned strategies with repetition for them to be implemented more automatically with less reliance on external assistance such as therapists, family members. 

Generalization- this is the process in which a client learns to apply skills learned with one task or in one setting to a variety of other task/setting. The goal is to assist clients to apply appropriate strategies for managing deficits in daily tasks. For example, you may learn an attention regulation strategy to help you focus on writing an email and not be distracted by other tasks on the computer. This same strategy can then be applied when you are shopping and are distracted by other tasks you have to get completed in the day.